People

RAY FRISBY, SPE, was promoted to vice president of technology at TAM International. He will lead the identification and development of new technology to facilitate the company’s growth in new markets. Additionally, he will be responsible for the planning and construction of the new TAM Technology Center, which is scheduled to open next year. Frisby has more than 27 years of experience in various technical and operational roles in the oilfield service sector. He has written numerous technical articles for oil and gas journals and professional societies. Frisby earned a BS in petroleum engineering and an MBA from Texas A&M University.

LARRY R. GRILLOT, SPE, was appointed to Pioneer Natural Resources’ board of directors. Grillot is currently dean of the Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy at the University of Oklahoma. Before joining the university, he worked for 30 years as a geophysicist for Phillips Petroleum in a variety of technical and managerial positions in exploration and production. He has held the position of manager of exploration and production technology and services, upstream technology and project development, manager of international exploration, president, and regional manager. Grillot earned a BS in physics from Mississippi State University and MS and PhD degrees in geological sciences from Brown University.

DANIEL PALMER, SPE, was appointed director of business development for the Middle East region at GlassPoint Solar. He has more than 20 years of experience at Schlumberger and has held positions including marketing and technology manager, North Sea operations manager, and vice president of sales and marketing in the Middle East. He earned a BS in petroleum engineering from Heriot-Watt University and an MS in engineering from the University of Cambridge.

SHARON STULTZ-KARIM, SPE, was appointed head of arbitration at Global Advocates, a Dubai law firm. She is a 30-year international oil and gas arbitrator and advocate. Stultz-Karim started her career as a production engineer with Gulf E&P in Bakersfield, California. She has held various senior advisory roles in national petroleum regulatory policy development and contract negotiations with the United States’ Minerals Management Service and the government of Papua New Guinea. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and is on the United Arab Emirates’ National Chartered Institutes of Arbitrators Committee. She also holds memberships in the Association of International Petroleum Negotiators and the International Bar Association. Stultz-Karim earned a BS in petroleum engineering from the University of Southern California, an MA in international political economy from Claremont Graduate University, and a master of laws in international arbitration from the Centre for Energy, Petroleum, and Mining Law and Policy, University of Dundee in the United Kingdom.

DONGXIAO ZHANG, SPE, was appointed dean of engineering at Peking University in Beijing. He has more than 20 years of research experience in groundwater hydrology, unconventional oil and gas production, and geological carbon sequestration. Zhang has held positions as chair professor at the University of Southern California, Miller chair professor of the department of petroleum and geological engineering at the University of Oklahoma, and senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a council member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Energy Architecture. Zhang has written two books and published more than 110 peer-reviewed papers. He was an associate editor for SPE Journal, Water Resource Research, Advances in Water Resources, Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, Journal of Computational Geosciences, and Vadose Zone Journal. Zhang earned MS and PhD degrees in hydrology and water resources from the University of Arizona.

In Memoriam

John M. Campbell Sr., an internationally renowned expert in the petroleum industry who served as chairman of the University of Oklahoma’s School of Petroleum Engineering, died 24 August 2013, at his home in Norman, Oklahoma, after a brief illness. He was 91.

Campbell was the author of more than 150 technical articles in production operations, phase behavior and properties, economics, and financial risk management analysis. He was the primary developer of the application of time value of money concepts to the petroleum and mineral industries, and wrote the first textbook that outlined the principles of the time value of money and decline curves. He also proposed the integrated system of property evaluation currently used throughout the industry. Campbell developed the first unified system of applying risk and uncertainty to the evaluation of exploration investments and coauthored the well-known, three-volume Mineral Property Economics, which extended the scope of his earlier work to oil shale and coal.

Campbell received numerous oil industry and SPE awards during his career in recognition of his contributions to engineering innovation, research, and teaching. He was an SPE Honorary Member and an SPE Distinguished Member, and received SPE’s John Franklin Carll Award and the AIME Mineral Economics Award. He also was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering.

Born in Virden, Illinois, Campbell earned a BS degree in chemical engineering from Iowa State University in 1943. Shortly after graduation, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project by his employer, DuPont, and was part of the team that developed the commercial manufacturing of plutonium and the atomic bomb used at the end of World War II. While on the project, he met and married Gwen Thompson; their marriage lasted 61 years until her death in 2006.

In 1946, he came to the University of Oklahoma (OU) as a graduate student and instructor in chemical engineering, and soon received a PhD degree in chemical engineering from the school. After working for 3 years in the industry, he was rehired by OU in its Petroleum Engineering Department and served as department chair for 12 years. He also served as the director of the Petroleum Research Center there and was the Halliburton Professor at the school before resigning in 1968 to found the first of several companies.

“I joined the Petroleum Branch of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers in 1952 as member number 2552,” Campbell wrote in an article for JPT in October 2007 celebrating SPE’s 50th anniversary. “What a fortunate move. The ‘Big Bang’ period of petroleum technology was in progress and, like our universe, it has continued to expand at an ever-increasing rate.

“It was both a chaotic and exhilarating time. I had become a part of what was as much a challenge as my previous work on the Manhattan Project during World War II. There were so many folks doing such great things and rising to the challenge.”

During his 19 years as a university professor, Campbell became a consultant to the global petroleum industry, which led to the formation of John M. Campbell and Company, a leader in training for natural gas conditioning and processing. He was an influential mentor to many students and professionals during his university and industry careers. In 2006, Campbell published an autobiography titled, A 20th Century Odyssey.

Campbell is survived by his three sons, John Jr. and his wife, Linda; Bob and his wife, Leslie; and Chuck; 10 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.